


Masked Andraste

by Christer_Bleu



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arbor Wilds, Blood Magic, Cults, Cultural Differences, Dragon Age The Last Court, Elemental Magic, Inquisition Agents (Dragon Age), Mage Rights, Mages and Templars, Multiple Religion & Lore Sources, Religion, Self-Acceptance, Serault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 11:55:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13235226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Christer_Bleu/pseuds/Christer_Bleu
Summary: New members flocked to the reasonable religious doctrine that denied neither the Marker nor Andraste but that was about it. Their strange views about land had resonated deeply within the hearts and minds of people living in areas heavily affected by the Mage-Templar War or blighted with rifts. That men belonged to the land: born upon it, living upon it, and when their spirit departed their mortal bodies returned to it was unexpectedly inspiring. The forsaking of the Fade in its current state as something created by the corrupted men in search of power was also powerfully moving. That the Cult did not elaborate of what happened to the Spirit after death had struck a powerful chord in Trevelyan.Why he was here was the other thing that the Cult was teaching, that the beast was not something separate from the man. Not some eternal test put forth by the Maker to determine an individual’s worth in an endless game of self-control but just another component of the soul. It was the acceptance of the beast as a part of themselves that created an aura of confidence about them, an aura of primordial power that trickled from their skin. That was true control, control achieved by surrender.





	Masked Andraste

**Author's Note:**

> This what happens when you're a security guard and you are required to work though the building you are supposed to be securing is closed for the holidays and you've got six shifts with eight hours of nothing to do and no partner to talk to and A/B/O on the mind. Happy freaking New Years.

When the world comes crumbling down around your ears who do you trust with your vulnerabilities and insecurities when you have been taught to trust no one as anyone and everyone around you has their own agendas. The answer was the only person in Sky Hold who had been honest and up front with their intentions and had done nothing at all to the effect of masking the fact that they had an agenda and aiding the Inquisition was just one small part of that grander agenda. The same person who had said that she would throw what little weight she had in the matter of who should be Divine behind Vivienne to drive the wedge further into the Chantry’s power base and laugh as the oppressive regime of religion fell around everyone’s ears because when a beast grew to that size and was so diseased the only mercy it could be shown was death. 

A brutal but honest opinion if ever there was one to be had. The Chantry had to be broken down and rebuilt from its foundations and it seemed as if no one close to the matter seemed to understand that. With civilization on the edge of collapse and the nobility running around like headless chickens dealing with the Templars and Mages trying to kill one another, and by extension killing everyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, arguments over succession paled in comparison to reestablishing order. The reestablishment of order was why he had agreed to become High Inquisitor and it was the maintenance of that order that drove him to creep as silently as he could through the cold halls of Sky Hold to the only person he was certain could help him. 

The same person who was actively pursuing the Seeker and plotting the death of Solas in the full view of everyone for reasons that Trevelyan was certain made sense to the coldly logical mind waiting down the hall but couldn’t hope to fathom himself. It wasn’t a blind hatred for elves, or even elven mages, it was just Solas. For reasons that both of them seemed well aware of. 

For years Trevelyan had been under the impression that the Orlesian Nobility was collectively incapable of being direct and to the point. Though that he had found the woman he was sneaking around like a pup after bedtime to see had been found in the company of Empress Celene’s Occult Advisor should have been enough of a clue. If the fact that she was not wearing a mask in a room full of potential assassins in very good disguises should have been enough. There was a mystery to the woman he wanted solved, his desire to find answers only stroked to new heights when Dorian had let slip that the Golden Finch had eyes on the Seeker for reasons he could only hope to guess at. 

So far the only answer that the Inquisitor had managed to get was cryptic enough and very unhelpful, _“That one will die of self-control if she’s not careful.”_

Standing before the simple wooden door he raised his hand to knock only to have it open before he had the chance. “Good evening, Dylant.” 

A bizarre moment passed when the incredible urge to look over his shoulder consumed Trevelyan, a swift inspection of the hall to determine who she had spoken to. Since waking after the Conclave it had become common practice for people to refuse to use his given name no matter how many time he had asked them. While he wasn’t the most devout and understood the importance of a hierarchy in such matters the members of his own war council should have the right to call him out using his own name if his ideas were poorly thought out. Instead they side stepped his request and fumbled awkwardly to find a way to politely point out the flaws in his planning. 

One of the few people he could justifiably interact with on a regular basis who would use his given name was the Golden Finch, Lady Adara Yvonne Gildrin Cynthia Dubois de Serault, Marchioness of Serault. A woman who possessed the title and breeding of a proper noble woman of Orlais but lacked the flamboyance and flagrancy one would expect. Somehow, despite the strange circumstances surrounding her upbringing the Lady was one of the most straight forward people serving in the Inquisition and as bold as a whore on the streets of Kirkwall after dusk. There was a certain shamelessness in her, a shamelessness matched only by her elder brother and father whom Trevelyan had had the pleasure of meeting only once at the Winter Palace. 

From what he had gathered from Leliana’s reports and rather stilted conversations with Vivienne the marquisate of Serault had suffered from some great scandal involving an abomination which had unceremoniously removed the local Marquis from his position as a powerful player in the ridiculous game the entire country engaged in as something of a national pass time. The family had fallen so far as to be relegated to the furthest edges of the _”board”_ and had its ancestral mask and name stripped from them by the Chantry four generations prior. The Divine Justina had given the Marquis back his family name and mask, though the family had continued to use the name in the intervening years, shortly before her death at the Conclave. 

In the years since the Shaming of Serault the marquisate had grown powerful once more. With the strain of the abomination tainting every action made and being excluded from the lengthy invitation list to court functions and galas the family had focused on reclaiming their old glory the hard way. Through silent politically advantageous marriages that would seem on the surface to be insignificant, targeting wealthy merchants and land owners who had not yet earned a title of nobility and enticing them in with the very real possibility of increased profits. By the time anyone had bothered to take a closer look at what was happening it had been too late. Through marriage and shared blood in pups the House Dubois had secured not insignificant holdings which included the land used to manufacture the raw plant material used in the more expensive dyes used in glassworks. 

Given the materialistic nature of Orlais it should have been rather obvious what the family had been doing in their years of silence but there was no stopping a superpower when it got going. As confirmed by Sister Nightengale’s more reliable sources the Empress herself had tried to sow dissent among the people of Serault to upset the balance two years ago but it had been too late. Serault had become an economic powerhouse and the orders for increasingly elaborate glassworks from Val Royeaux, lumber from everywhere that could afford it, wood work and pelts were not slowing in the slightest. There were also darker rumors about a potent intoxicant of lyrium base with staggeringly addictive properties being manufactured wholesale in Serault and distributed to the fractured remains of desperate Circles. 

But no one had survived getting close enough to the criminals peddling the drug to have any concrete answers. 

Despite the abundance of wealth House Dubois now possessed, their Shaming, the erasure of their shame and return of their family’s mask they held just as tightly to the old traditions that had existed in the Arbor Wild long before the Chantry as their forbearers had. Some would point to this as proof that the incident with the abomination would happen once more, plunging the Western Expanse back into chaos with the sudden collapse of the most financially stable marquisate in the region. Others would say that the restoration of many of the old laws and lax hand of the Chantry in the marquisate was why it had not been burned at any point in the last ten years. 

When supply lines had been compromised as the war between the Templars and Mages continued Marquis Dubois had repelled the laws concerning poaching the lord’s territory and given each man and woman the right to claim the life of any game they came across to feed their family. When the Chantry had begun to buckle under its hard handed ways before the fighting had become widespread Marquise Dubois had reminded his people that they had lived without the Chantry interfering in their lives for near on one hundred years. One hundred years of _”godlessness_ and yet the people had maintained their morals. 

It was at that point that someone should have stepped in to stop House Dubois from going any further but the people who could had either been too busy fighting for the sake of fighting or had not perceived them as a threat. A brief visit from the last Divine just one month after had cemented Serault’s place in the silent hierarchy. Among the last of the people who had been blessed by the Divine before her death at the Conclave had been the three surviving members of House Dubois. And that was a matter of official record. 

The family who had secretly made an army of hunters and warriors out of everyone in their lands with the strength to draw a long or short bow had been among the last ten people blessed by the Divine. The family that was now amongst the richest in Orlais and had become so wealthy beneath the noses of Imperial Solicitors too consumed by the thought of the Shaming and too preoccupied with looking down at House Dubois to realize that all the paperwork had been filed correctly. The family that had birthed a force of nature and perhaps the greatest player to ever grace the board since Andraste herself but had gone as unnoticed for five years as the rapid increase in the sum sent to Val Royeaux as taxes each year for the last century. 

Anywhere else it the world such a feat would have been impossible but Orlais seemed to function well enough, even with its ridiculous rules. 

Smiling nervously Trevelyan bowed his head slightly in a quick gesture of acknowledgement and strode into the fire lit chamber beyond the door, trying to exude the essence of everything that was alpha. Calm, confident, controlled, and utterly terrified of what he had come to ask in the pit of his stomach. 

For the slightest moment he hesitated, all that he had learned about this woman fading from memory as he beheld the interior of her sitting chamber and wondered if somehow he hadn’t stepped through a portal into a hunting lodge on the edge of civilization somewhere in the Western Expanse. His left palm tingled with the sudden awareness that this was a place of power, or similar enough to a place of power that it made no difference though he was absolutely certain that the Golden Finch was no mage. How she had come across a familiar despite this he couldn’t be sure. 

Said familiar raised his smoky black head and peered at Trevelyan with more intelligence and potential malice than an animal should be able to possess. Arbor Hounds were said to not be as intelligent as Mabari but only _just_ , slim and lean where marbari were bulky the brute lying on a bear skin beside the hearth was all sinew and bone and barely contained violence. 

At some point some enterprising or insane young lord in Serault or Alyons had gotten it into his head to cross Mabari and Tevinter Slave Hounds with the local hunting dogs and shepherds. The end result was a breed of dogs that were as loyal as mabari, vicious as slave hounds, and as uncontrollable as wolves if they weren’t nursery dogs. A man who had never visited the Arbor Wilds would question why anyone would suffer a creature that could kill a man as easily as a rabbit or mink in their homes and around their pups. A man who had visited the Arbor Wilds would question why they hadn’t continued to refine the breed with Templar Spell Hounds or Sight Hounds. 

Trevelyan had never personally visited the Arbor Wilds but had seen Swift Wind in action twice, the two hundred pound animal had charged up a tree as easy as it would charge across an open field to get at a Red Templar’s squire. He did not want to know what had been prowling the fields and forests of Serault to make this dog so popular among nobles and small folk alike. In the Tevinter Imperium nobles kept lap dogs and he doubted if Swift Wind had been able to sit in his mistress’ lap without crushing her for years. 

He made it a point to take a seat on one of the fur padded leather benches furthest from the dog and closest to the exit. If Swift Wind got it into his mind to charge Trevelyan’s best hope would be to dive for the window, the dagger at his belt was unlikely to find anything vital beneath all of that muscle. 

Seated Trevelyan reflected on how calming the room around him was: simple furnishings made of wood polished to gleam in the light reflected from the hearth, the floor adorned with the aforementioned bear pelt serving as a no doubt comfortable bed for the hound and another stretched between the three benches arrayed around a low table in the center of the room. The benches were padded with what appeared to be wolf belts, they were likely local given the recent decrease in sightings by the scouts. Above the hearth hung the only tapestry in the room bearing the heraldry of Serault in simple dyed linen, beige and bronze and proud despite the obvious signs of fading through age and use. 

The only display of ornamentation that was not purely practical in the space were the seven glass knives arrayed on a supple leather tarp on the low table between the benches. Each varied in length, thickness and color. How exactly the knives were created Trevelyan could only begin to guess at but they were tied deeply into the culture of the marquisate where they were crafted and unlike other ceremonial weapons these were live blades. Unlike the ridiculous sword that Josephine had presented him with for use when addressing the Inquisition or entertaining _guests_ in Sky Hold for longer than was strictly necessary to conduct business. 

Unlike that frankly impressive piece of artistry, which at best would serve as a the most magnificent club ever to see battle, these knives were as lethal as they were beautiful. Composed of what appeared to be two different types of glass to Trevelyan’s untrained eye, each sporting a core as opaque as stone running the length surrounded by cloudy glass stained so as to draw the eye away from the imperfections in the substrate it was blown from. All together it looked to be an intentional choice made by an artist. The longest of the weapons on the table as the length of his forearm and usually hung from Lady Adara’s right hip. Trevelyan had personally seen that knife slice through leather and flesh to find home in a would be assassin’s lungs after a particularly nasty tavern brawl had broken out between the Chargers and some of the newer Inquisition recruits two months back. He supposed that it made since that a people who had limited access to iron would find other weapons with which to kill one another but lethal glass weaponry was among the least of the things that he would have expected to see. 

To be fair he hadn’t expected to meet an omega noble woman of seventeen years as uncommonly skillful with both bow and blade as Lady Adara or for the sky to decide for reasons yet to be discovered to open a physical tear between the physical world and the Fade. But a tentative friend with the means to fund the Inquisition who cared little and less about the opinions of his countrymen and the Chantry was a friend that Trevelyan would take. Even if said friendship and support only came when the Inquisition had made it clear that it was reintroducing much needed stability in Thedas before it focused on the chaotic mess that was the Chantry. 

Marquis Dubois de Serault had, however, made it clear that the moment that the Inquisition turned its eyes and steel back to the question of the Sun Burst Throne in earnest that much of his support would then end. It was a position that Trevelyan had understood and accepted, it had not been he who had called himself the Herald of Andraste. Nonetheless he’d be drug kicking and screaming head into this mess when his mission had only been to escort the representative from Tevinter’s largest Circle to the Conclave. 

If he had had any idea that any of this was going to happen he would have likely run off and joined a mercenary band. “I didn’t know I was expected.” 

The Golden Finch resembled her name sake, the slim and deceptively delicate frame of an omega and hair as gold as sunrise falling in loose, lazy curls down her back. Another woman, a woman who had lived a slightly different life, would have dressed in silk or elaborate dresses, but Lady Adara would not look right to Trevelyan in anything but that uniform or black leather. Something about the bronze great coat with its shiny bronze buttons, heraldry and white chords seemed right. Even with the eye of the Inquisition stitched in white on the left breast. 

“Of course you were, Dylant. There isn’t anyone else in Sky Hold you can talk to about your recent difficulties who won’t tell you to pray, meditate, stutter through some frankly useless advice, or find someone willing to be fucked senseless for the duration of your rut.” 

“How have you not been killed yet?” the words escaped him before he realized what he was saying. It hadn’t been the first time Trevelyan had wondered how the Chantry hadn’t contrived to kill this woman and succeeded given the resources they possessed, even as depleted as they were at the moment. 

True they had tried to head off the disaster brewing in Serault and assassins didn’t care how old their target was if you paid tem well enough but someone had decided that the Cult wasn’t a danger to the Chantry’s power. All they had needed to do was find a religious fanatic –not difficult especially now- and over embellish the details concerning the heretical sect and their future shaman. Instead the Chantry had dispatched the best of their Templars and Seekers and rigorously tested the girl for any latent magical abilities. At seven Lady Adara wouldn’t have the wherewithal or skill to hide that she was a mage but despite propaganda a shaman was no more a hedge witch than a miller was a King. 

Cut to ten years later when, after the Inquisition and establish something of a resemblance of order in the Hinterlands following the Conclave, the Cult of Masked Andraste had arrived in Haven fully armed and armored with twenty-thousand soldiers and a convoy of much needed supplies. At first many had feared that the Cult would use the Inquisition as a way to spread its influence and corrupt the Chantry from within. But the generally cheerful lot had accepted the terms that Trevelyan had put to them, had not started any problems with the other Inquisition soldiers and attended regular service with the devout. However before the year was out the Cult had spread like wildfire through the ranks and out into regions beyond. 

New members flocked to the reasonable religious doctrine that denied neither the Marker nor Andraste but that was about it. Their strange views about land had resonated deeply within the hearts and minds of people living in areas heavily affected by the Mage-Templar War or blighted with rifts. That men belonged to the land: born upon it, living upon it, and when their spirit departed their mortal bodies returned to it was unexpectedly inspiring. The forsaking of the Fade in its current state as something created by the corrupted men in search of power was also powerfully moving. That the Cult did not elaborate of what happened to the Spirit after death had struck a powerful chord in Trevelyan. 

“Maybe I have and just don’t know it.” Honesty, from the leader of this heretical but very helpful religious movement, “But that is not why you’re here.” 

No. Why he was here was the other thing that the Cult was teaching, that the beast was not something separate from the man. Not some eternal test put forth by the Maker to determine an individual’s worth in an endless game of self-control but just another component of the soul. It was the acceptance of the beast as a part of themselves that created an aura of confidence about them, an aura of primordial power that trickled from their skin. That was true control, control achieved by surrender. 

He could feel it now, the unexplained magnetism that surrounded Lady Adara, the self-possession surrounding the omega that drew him in. It was more than just the brazen use of one’s sexuality to shock or to shame, leveraging the omega part of her nature to achieve her own goals. Lady Adara Yvonne Gildrin Cynthia Dubois de Serault was just an omega and did not care who knew or what they thought about it. 

“You’re not going to tell me to run naked through the woods are you?” he attempted half-heartedly at humor, the smile dying on his lips at the expression on her face. He blanched slightly, he hadn’t been remotely serious about running naked in the woods but she most certainly had taken it that way. 

“Inquisitor Trevelyan,” she began as she took a seat on the bench closest to Swift Wind, “It is far too cold for that up here in the mountains especially in autumn. Were it summer it would be an option to consider though I would recommend wearing boots as stones are unforgiving, if you intend to join our Solstice festivities.” Eyes the color of deeply stained emerald glass regarded him calmly. 

“Can you teach me how to control myself through my rut?” he blurted out, best to get it done with as fast as he could and get back to something far less embarrassing. As an alpha it was expected of him to know what he should be doing at all times, to know how to conduct and control himself at all times, not come in secret to visit an omega and ask for advice. Such things simply were not done in the Imperium, or anywhere else really. 

“That depends entirely on if you are willing to forsake the barbaric sociosexual hierarchy that you have been a part of since you were born and accept a no less barbaric but purer social hierarchy that your instincts have been trying to direct you too.” There it was, no sermon, not denouncement of his beliefs, just the reality that all his life he had been missing a pack and that if he was willing to accept the consequences of what he was asking that he would have one. 

Unable to speak Dylant Trevelyan simply nodded, “Very well then, tell Josephine to keep a bucket of cold water in every room that you will be in for the duration of your rut. It would be easier if you spend the next few weeks in the training yard with Captain Arvis’ men.” Before he could open his mouth and ask why she smiled. “If you’re too exhausted you won’t feel your desires as keenly and cold water works exceptionally well at snapping even drunkards to their senses.” 

What had he just gotten himself into? 


End file.
